Just a reminder — Trump is not our first predator president

Just a reminder — Trump is not our first predator president

It’s getting harder to be a pedophile not easier. Thomas Jefferson had children with an enslaved 14–16 year old in exchange for the freedom of her children.

Robert Reich has this all wrong. The super assholes aren’t new. They are showing up in force now because the asshole way of life is threatened.

Thomas Jefferson was president in an 1801 America that allowed slavery, did not allow women to vote, and openly had minor sex workers.

New York in 1858

To assess the situation of New York itself, Sanger conducted interviews with 2000 prostitutes in New York asking them about their demographics, situation, and motivation. In total he estimated there to be 6000 prostitutes in New York, meaning that about 1 out of every 200 people or 0.5% of the population was a prostitute. He found out that most prostitutes were poor and uneducated and were between 15 and 25 years old with teenage prostitution from 13 years old onwards being very common.

President Grover Cleveland was in office March 4, 1885 — March 4, 1889 despite having an illicit child with and probably raping a woman named Maria Halpin.

In an 1884 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Halpin accused Cleveland of a violent sexual assault that led to her pregnancy, followed by a coordinated campaign to abduct her child and have her forcibly institutionalized in an asylum to secure his own political future.

An agreement exists from the period, written in Cleveland’s own handwriting, stipulating that Halpin was to surrender the child for a payment of five hundred dollars. Cleveland’s campaign successfully managed the scandal by painting Halpin as an untrustworthy harlot, allowing him to win the presidency despite the opposition’s famous chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”.

But wait Cleveland is also busy grooming his first lady:

The “Uncle Cleve” Guardianship and Marriage to Frances Folsom

While in office, the forty-nine-year-old Cleveland married twenty-one-year-old Frances Folsom in a small White House ceremony in June 1886, making her the youngest First Lady in U.S. history. The union drew substantial scrutiny because of Cleveland’s prior relationship with Folsom during her childhood. Cleveland had been the law partner and close friend of Frances’s father, Oscar Folsom, and had known Frances since her infancy, purchasing her first baby carriage and earning the moniker “Uncle Cleve”.

Following Oscar Folsom’s death in 1875, when Frances was eleven years old, Cleveland was appointed the administrator of the Folsom estate and became her unofficial guardian. He maintained a close relationship with her as she grew up, financing her education, selecting her clothing, and sending flowers to her dormitory.

Grooming is also the pedophilia of choice of William Andrews Clark Sr. an an American mining magnate known as one of the four Copper Kings. He was a U.S. Senator from Montana from 1901 to 1907.

This type of grooming / financial manipulation is an entire genre among the wealthy and powerful of that era — except Carnegie:

Carnegie’s marriage to Whitfield was not grooming or financial manipulation but Louise Whitfield was the extremely competent person behind Carnegie’s philanthropy. These days a Whitfield would most likely be too engrossed with her own career to consider marrying someone 28 years older.

By the 1920s there are at least start to be some laws and consequences for these outrages:

Now tracking super assholes into the 2000s, they are having a tougher time.

Jerry Seinfeld’s began dating Lonstein in 1993 when Seinfeld was 38 and she was 17 but the couple broke up in 1997 under media scrutiny.

Plus Catholic Church pedophilia was caught in the 2000s:

Numerous dioceses in the United States have faced large civil settlements related to clerical abuse; major agreements included 25.7 million dollars paid by the Archdiocese of Louisville in 2003, 85 million dollars paid by the Archdiocese of Boston that same year, and settlements in Portland, Seattle, and Denver between 2007 and 2008 totaling more than 125 million dollars. Several dioceses, including Tucson, Spokane, Portland, Davenport, and San Diego, sought bankruptcy protection in response to large numbers of claims, and by 2011 eight dioceses had filed for bankruptcy.

The Epstein pedophile ring faced more and more prosecution as we get closer to the present.

As AI puts it:

Ultimately, this paradigm shift established a new baseline for the prevention of elite deviance, emphasizing that safeguarding vulnerable youth requires the continuous, rigorous dismantling of the systemic power structures that enable abuse to hide in plain sight.

Now of course this is all anecdotal evidence, but if anything its pointing to the age of super assholes coming to an end with Trump and Musk — not starting there. And of course super assholes do other things like start wars, but if you want to track Robert Reich’s metric of

a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame, and a disintegration of public morality

then it’s much easier to do with pedophilia than war where very occasionally America has a good reason to use force.

Unfortunately the super assholes have a third dick move that rounds out the pedophilia and war — causing economic hardship.

Because men make more than women in America, economic hardship creates disproportionately more young women that can be targeted by patriarchy predators. So after the 2008 great recession (due in large part to deregulation by super asshole George W. Bush):

By 2014, a staggering 31% of young women (ages 25–34) with only a high school diploma were living in poverty. In contrast, poverty for young men with the same level of education peaked at 17% in 2011.

Older men taking advantage of destitute younger women who still want to have children is really the bedrock of the super asshole way of life.

In 2024, the national poverty rate stood at 12.65% for adult women compared to 9.65% for adult men — representing a baseline gender gap of 3.0 percentage points across all adult age groups.

The gap remains widest during the peak childbearing years (25 to 34) because women continue to face the “motherhood penalty” in wages, shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid care giving, and represent the vast majority of single-parent householders.

However besides being less destitute modern American women are simply refusing to have children at a young, impoverished age.

Women having a career in general is an issue for men that want the full imbalanced relationship dynamic. Henry Cavill then dating a 19 year old explains:

She’s there when I need looking after and the world is a little too heavy. Then she will happily take that weight for me and make sure that I am OK.

Try getting that kind of emotional labor from a woman coming home from a hard day at work.

However even if, or more accurately when, Trump pulls the third super asshole dick move of causing a recession, it’s not clear how much pedophilia and power imbalanced relationships that will generate. Make America great again at pedophilia won’t come easy and that’s why this is more about super asshole strength waning.